Using Mixup

Mixup is an app for macOS that keeps track of your glazes and materials. It also helps you understand your glazes better by breaking them down into the oxides that make up the materials potters use.

All of your glazes and materials are kept in one list:

Everything in Mixup is a mix. A mix is a mixture of other mixes or oxides. Every mix has a list of ingredient mixes by weight. So glazes are a mix, materials are a mix and glaze blends are a mix. Oxides are a special kind of mix - they are just themselves, a molecule with a weight, and they are the building blocks of Mixup. It's mixes all the way down to oxides.

Materials are usually specified in terms of oxides, like this material analysis by weight of Custer Feldspar:

A material manufacturer usually provides a data sheet that give the oxide analysis by weight. For example Edgar Plastic Kaolin (EPK) is a popular glaze ingredient in North America, and the Edgar Minerals mining company provides an analysis on its website.

Glazes are usually collections of materials, like this cone 6 glaze from Digital Fire:

But you can have materials that are composed of other materials, and you can have glazes that are line blends composed of other glazes or are defined in terms of oxides. In the world of Mixup everything is a mix.

Mixup's job is to distill any mix into an analysis of its constituent oxides.